The Wake

Take a mental note of all the ways you keep track of yourself, the ways you record, tag, and publicize your life: MySpace, Flickr, your personal website, your blog. Consider who’s watching. Imagine filling a theater with the clique you share your digitized life with, the strangers, lovers, exes, friends, enemies, and weirdoes who access your online production of yourself. In the minutes before Week 18 of Suzan-Lori Park’s 365 Days/365 Plays took the stage at the Suburban World Theater on Saturday, March 17th, I thought about the bars in Uptown, filled with St.Patty’s Day celebrants whose tipsy photos would be regurgitated onto the Internet in the morning. I thought about my own affinity for documenting myself through blogs and photo-sharing sights. I thought, as the show was about to begin, about lifelogging, which will …

Read more →

There are certain fleeting moments that are so full of sun, there’s no room for cynicism. As clouds cleared, light and warmth suddenly filtered through the greenhouse’s glass dome, flooding a gratifying display of red tulips, yellow lilies and blue pansies. A semi circle of children sat around the fountain watching the carp, who watched the Terzetto string trio, who pierced the humid air with Vivaldi. On the weekend of Mar. 24, Como Park celebrated a shamelessly tackily named Spring Fling Weekend, commemorating the beginning of spring and of their Spring Flower Show. Nobody can ignore the spring and Como Park provides the perfect, relatively inexpensive location for those who want to forget life for a day and be shamelessly, tackily happy. For those in our readership still capable of such primitive emotion, this is …

Read more →

When warmer weather starts to peak out through winter’s snowy veil, it’s not uncommon for the number of bicyclists out on the streets to multiply. Even if the weather isn’t reason enough to get out on a bike, gas prices usually are. Despite all the motivation to take a spin on the old ten-speed, many people have misgivings about biking in the city. Automobiles are not known for their friendliness towards cyclists. And for the fashionably inclined, the bike helmet is not a favorite accessory. In order to overcome these biking obstacles, members of the Northeast community in Minneapolis have collaborated on a project resulting in The Northeast Arts District Bike Map, a map highlighting the most effective route for biking amongst the plethora of art galleries in the northeast area.The map was produced by …

Read more →

The Jameson was working its way through the veins on St. Patrick’s Day, and local rockers The Gleam wouldn’t have it any other way. The trio from Chisago County revved up the drunken crowd at the Uptown Bar with songs like “Fat and Stoned” and “High ’N Mighty.”Don’t let the wall of distortion from front man Zachary Johns fool you; once bass player Timmy Wreck’s thumping bass lines leave his seventy-dollar amp head you realize, this is country music, country music done right.“Punch-country,” Wreck says, “It’s revved up, rowdy rock and roll, the kind of stuff you listened to with your dad and you can sing all the words to.” Wreck has a raw, yet melodic approach to his instrument; he plays an old Fender Jazz Bass stripped down to the wood, down to …

Read more →

From disagreements to wars, think of how much is lost through a lack of understanding. The Minnesota Center for Book Arts addresses this issue in their current exhibit Found in Translation, which runs through April 28 in their 10th Avenue South gallery. The exhibit, set in MCBA’s exposed brick studio, with stylish red accents, features works from all mediums including paintings, drawings, sculpture, computer programs, audio, and mixed media. “We want to challenge the idea that people have in their heads of what a book is,” explains MCBA Artistic Director, Jeff Rathermel. “A really broad definition of a book [is something that] communicates an idea through narration.”The Found in Translation exhibit incorporates Rathermel’s agenda nicely. It defines the word translation as loosely as Rathermel defines a book, as “the conversion of something from one form …

Read more →

Cold War Kids craft a demographically confused sound. Though the group is based out of southern California, they’re contenders for the dirtiest alt-blues group crown (excluding the White Stripes, of course). Together since ’04, they rose to prominence in ’06 with the release of their heralded full-length debut, Robbers and Cowards. Playing several high status festivals over the summer, the group ended the year on many a top 10 list. On March 7th, the group played their first ever Minnesota show with their friends, Delta Spirit, in the opening slot.To much dismay, the scheduled opener for the evening had been canceled. Tokyo Police Club, a new group from Canada, found themselves in the midst of the snow storm and out of a gig. Fortunately, the evening’s headliner came prepared with one of the best shows …

Read more →

After a weekend free of time clocks, company policies and homework, no one’s excited to begin their week again. Monday, for most part, is easily the worst day of the week. What most people don’t realize is that they have a choice in the matter. Instead of wasting Monday night cursing softly to your dog, why not expel stress cursing the very existence of Monday to an entire crowd. Take your Monday to a Poetry Slam, and make Monday the last day of your weekend.Monday, March 5th was the one-year anniversary of the Soap Box Slam. At 8 p.m. the Artists’ Quarter was buzzing with excitement for the night’s main event. Poets rehearsed one last time, talked with their competitors, or bellied-up to the bar for a drink of liquid courage. Audience members mingled …

Read more →

Contemporary artistic expression is always struggling to reinvent itself. Everybody wants to create something that has never been seen before. The Walker Art Center’s series of films premieres, called First Look, are no exception. March 23rd-25th the Walker showcased an award winning film that is innovative by allowing the story to tell itself. Many great minds have agreed that beauty is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but where there is nothing to take away. The film, Our Daily Bread, directed by Austrian-born Nikolaus Geyrhalter, does just that by dispensing with commentary, music, and superfluous plot. The goal of Our Daily Bread is to honestly show people the places their food is produced. “The production of food is … a part of a closed system that people have extremely vague ideas about,” …

Read more →

When the band coming onstage includes a guy wearing a pointy hat, a floral blouse, black and yellow striped tights and red sneakers, you know you’re in for a good time. If he can play the cello like a fiddle while doing a mild head bang, well … it doesn’t get much better than that. The antics of cellist Rushad Eggleston are just one of the highlights of a live concert by Crooked Still. On March 9th, this bluegrass band from the east coast played a lively and entertaining set to a sold-out crowd at the Cedar Cultural Center. It’s not just Eggleston that will send you reeling. Dr. Gregory Liszt (yes, he has a Ph.D. in biology from MIT) has been called “the Jimmy Page of the banjo,” and the sultry Aoife O’Donovan is …

Read more →

“This next band is Rock … the way it used to be, Rock … the way it SHOULD BE, and ROCK … THE WAY IT ALWAYS WILL BE … WOLF-MUTHAAA!!!” This summer, Lollapalooza founder Perry Farrell bestowed the band with this grand introduction on the festival’s second day. The band, feeding off the crowd’s excited roar, took the stage at a run. They picked up their instruments in mid stride and threw the riotous crowd into a time warp frenzy of free loving, eternal rock. This powerhouse trio from Australia has been blowing minds around the globe since their full length debut in May 2006. On February 28th, the group blew into the Myth in Maplewood as part of their current North American tour. It at happened on that night that it began to snow. …

Read more →

Elvis Perkins grew up surrounded by fame and suffering. This 32-year-old singer- songwriter lost his father, Tony Perkins (most famous for his role as Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho), to AIDS in 1992. It was a very public, controversial death due to the homosexual pretenses of his affliction. Elvis’s mother, Berry Berenson, was on American Airlines Flight 11 when it was hijacked and flown in to the one of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11. His new album, Ash Wednesday, released on its namesake has been in the works since 2002. It’s a mix of songs written before and after his mother’s death, and is ordered chronologically as thus. Overbearing themes are a sometimes coated, often times proclaimed, sullenness and a search for explanations and meaning. The disc opener, “While You Were Sleeping,” is …

Read more →

Many children dream of growing up to become astronauts and explorers only to abandon these dreams before even reaching middle school. Kobie Boykins, a mechanical engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, would like to convince children that those dreams can actually become reality.Boykins states that many children stop dreaming of having an atypical career once they reach about ten years old. “And why should that happen?” says Boykins, who grew up knowing he wanted to build space equipment. “And now I can,” he says.At 32, Boykins is renowned for his work on the solar arrays of the 2003 Mars Expedition Rovers. Boykins was responsible for nearly every aspect of the solar arrays, ranging from their appearance, to their function and method of deployment. Now, three years later, Boykins has joined a group of individuals who …

Read more →

There are certain places that young women are advised not to travel alone to at night. Whether well-earned or not, Northeast Minneapolis holds a reputation as the “bad part of town”. For a neighborhood that boasts the highest concentration of children in the Twin Cities, it looks in poor shape, full of traffic, liquor stores, and fast food restaurants. In little steps at a time – one group is trying to change perspectives of Northeast from the inside out. Juxtaposition Arts’ initiative, aptly titled “Remix: Creating Places for People on West Broadway,” is responsible for the mysterious bursts of life and creativity that have been appearing around the neighborhood: murals on Emerson and Broadway Avenue, a sculpture park on the corner of 2nd Street and West Broadway, banners on area light posts. Juxtaposition arts …

Read more →

“We have become spectators to our own culture.” These are the prophetic words of Sandy Speiler’s vision “Invigorate the Common Well,” being staged at the Heart of the Beast Puppet Theater. Both hopeful and painful, the theatrical performance is a passionate combination of public art and social justice. “Come to the Well,” the first in a three part series, confronts the problems of water distribution throughout the globe, from the suburbs of the Midwest to the slums of India. The show begins with a slideshow/live action performance piece. Images of streams are juxtaposed over poverty-stricken children; drops of water providing for a village are mixed with the drops of blood from thirsty protesters. “Invigorate the Common Well” is a step towards recognizing the consequences of our personal and governmental decisions …

Read more →

As the stage lights come up, five people stand in small bowls, singing and motioning as though they’re in a shower. One by one, they recall being children in South Africa, and the moment that they realized things were changing, and they were becoming adults. Each of them speak of the difficulty of the past and the desire to move forward. As the sequence comes to a close, one actor describes the past as covered in dust, and says that “until we go back and claim each piece, we will never be free.”Each of these actors grew up in South Africa during apartheid, a period of colonization much like segregation in the southern United States, when European powers enforced separateness between races according to an assigned legal classification. Amajuba: Like Doves We Rise, is the …

Read more →